Between the June 2007 Alaska cruise where Sarah Palin was introduced to the GOP establishment and her disastrous Sept 2008 interview with Katie Couric, the Republicans never really talked with Sarah Palin in what we call English. They talked in that distinctive Republican code made up of bumper sticker sayings.

This is how she got through the vetting process. Her interviewers listened attentively while Palin talked in bumper sticker code and they concluded that they were listening to a genius. This is weirdly close to the plot of the movie "Being There". <link> For fifteen months Sarah Palin played the role of Chauncey Gardiner.

I love that movie, Being There.

But I hardly think Republican bigwigs thought they were speaking to a genius in Sarah Palin. But I 100% guarantee they took a glance at her breasts during the interviews.

Good one - I love the concept of "Bumper Sticker Speak" - maybe abreviated to BS speak.

I always thought the movie had one terrible weakness, and that was that Peter Sellers delivered the character with so much exaggerated slowness that anyone considering him a genius was more than a tat beyond credibility. Palin would make a much more convincing Gardiner in the sense that she is pretty fast at delivering her BS speak. HER credibility stretch comes from the fact that she doesn't LIMIT it to short phrases which could be interpreted however people wanted (like the statements of the Delphic Oracles and other soothsayers for millennia)... she has to go on and on and on leaving no-one in any doubt about the weirdness of it all. But then that didn't create a problem for Mussolini, Hitler, Castro or any of the other terminally long-winded. Just goes to show that there is a large mass of the world's population for whom rational and extended analysis is by no means a necessary feature of their leadership requirements or indeed probably their own thought processes.

Oh my God, you've nailed it.

The point of "Being There" was that the people around Gardner projected onto him what they wanted to see. The Republican Right needed a candidate who could defend tax cuts for the rich and a stupid war from the perspective of a working class woman. Palin fit the role, and the pundits were so desperate for someone to fill it that they overlooked the fact that she was really unqualified for the office. Most of the American people, however, quickly saw through that.

There is also the fact that Palin had actually won an election to the highest office in her state, which implied to them that she must have the ability to attract voters from beyond the far right, much as Dubya had been able to do in Texas. If they'd known a bit more about Alaska politics, they might have realized that this wasn't true.

My only problem with your equivalence is that I found Chauncey Gardiner charming and dear throughout the whole movie. Also, it was his innocence that kept me engaged, and that innocence was a perfect foil for the machinations of those around him.

Sarah Palin is anything BUT innocent. And, she is certainly no genius. She does, however, excel at Bumper-Sticker-Speak and in that regard she has been wholly consistent. In fact, that may be the single consistent piece of Sarah-Palin-Public-Persona -- which suits her well for "book" and "reality show" which seems to be the future to which she's headed.

yes, but Chauncey had a heart of gold. Palin, not so much; to her family maybe and the roundtable of sniveling sycophants she's collected, but everyone else has to toe her line exactly 100% of the time or she mentally bathes them in acid till there's nothing left of them but bone. she's actually all about loathing and fear, and revenge, big time.

and, you know, Dahlia and others keep talking about Palin's physical beauty, but I just don't see it at all. I've looked for it, but look closely into her eyes - and closely at her self-adoring smile that quickly deteriorates into a venal sneer - and all that's in there is a repugnant narcissism that belittles all that she feels doesn't enable her ambition, a meanness that undercuts every sweeping platitude, and a self-regard full of feelings of inadequacy that she overcompensates for with a grandiosity of a false self that to me is completely nauseating.

so, beauty? no. more like cosmeticized horror and vapidity, a personalized version of Arendt's banality of evil. more like a totality of weevils.

Unlike Chauncey Gardiner, I doubt Sarah Palin can walk on water.

Shame on the "media" for allowing someone this ill-informed and ill-suited to get as close as she did to the White House.

And shame on us, supposed citizens, for being too lazy to pay attention.

>>And in the end, this may explain why she quit.

We all fear that she has not quit. As others have said, she doesn't appear to have been in this for the politics, to make a career of making Wasilla or Alaska or the USA a better place to live. The unknown is where and how she will pop up next, like a serial offender in a horror movie. Will she be another Coultergeist, with no redeeming values or contributions whatsoever but with a huge national stage?

Another post has noted that the GOP was so hungry for someone who could hold on to "don't tax the rich" or "push the latest war" values and at the same time appeal to the working class that they were willing to overlook her inability to actually lead, to do her daily job. Well, Bush II and Reagan and even Nixon has struck me exactly the same way. And so many other current Republican pols seem to fit that criteria.

I don't know exactly who "they" are, but they need bodies who are loyal to "them", and what those bodies can or can't do otherwise is immaterial. Too cynical ?

You libs are so intelligent. What you didn't realize about Chauncey Gardiner was that he was an idiot savant unlike most of you who are just plain idiots. Sarah Palin doesn't pretend to be an intellectual but neither did Lincoln or Truman both of whom did a great job in leading our country through some of its most difficult periods. The upper echelon of the Nazi considered themselves intellectuals but were morally bankrupt and evil. According to Wikipedia "Goebbels was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism. He was the chief architect of the Kristallnacht attack on the German Jews, which historians consider to be the commencement of the Nazi violence culminating in the Holocaust. Goebbels earned a Ph.D. from Heidelberg University in 1921". You libs may end up like the Germans if you continue to undermine and reject the values that made this country great.

stagn1:

You libs are so intelligent. What you didn't realize about Chauncey Gardiner was that he was an idiot savant unlike most of you who are just plain idiots. Sarah Palin doesn't pretend to be an intellectual but neither did Lincoln or Truman both of whom did a great job in leading our country through some of its most difficult periods. The upper echelon of the Nazi considered themselves intellectuals but were morally bankrupt and evil. According to Wikipedia "Goebbels was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism. He was the chief architect of the Kristallnacht attack on the German Jews, which historians consider to be the commencement of the Nazi violence culminating in the Holocaust. Goebbels earned a Ph.D. from Heidelberg University in 1921". You libs may end up like the Germans if you continue to undermine and reject the values that made this country great.

Stagn1: You just compared Sarah Palin to Abraham Lincoln and Harry S Truman. Absolutely stunning.

You compared Sarah Palin to Chauncey Gardiner. Absolutely Stunning.

@ stagn1:

No disrespect, but your post is a perfect illustration of Godwin's Law. <link>

You seem to know a lot about Sarah Palin. How could you know so much about a person you'v never known personally or lived with. Unless you are describing yourself.

"You seem to know a lot about Sarah Palin. How could you know so much about a person you'v never known personally or lived with."

Oh, c'mon now. Every informed person in the country knows that Sarah Palin is the living embodiment of the Peter Principle. <link> If there was ever any doubt about that, her resignation as governor of Alaska confirmed it.

Peggy Noonan was a speech writer for Ronald Reagan and is now a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Her conservative credentials are impeccable. In this very recent WSJ column Noonan eviscerates Sarah Palin. <link> Sensible conservatives see Palin for what she is and are willing to admit it.

STAGN1: So let me understand this -- Goebbels had a PhD and Sarah Palin doesn't, so therefore liberals are Nazis and Palin is a great leader for the forces of freedom. Why didn't I SEE this before now?

Intellectuals come in all flavors -- good, bad, "morally bankrupt and evil." So do ordinary people like Lincoln and Truman, and like Hitler and Stalin, neither of whom had any intellectual pretensions and both of whom, like Palin, used anti-intellectualism as part of their stock political arguments for themselves. It all comes down to who you trust and who you don't, and whether or not they've got a Ph. D. has squat to do with it.